Infuriated by the waste of eighty critical postmortem minutes, Laborde decided to meet his next head at the cemetery gates and set directly to work on it. He and his assistants rigged a makeshift traveling laboratory in the back of a horse-drawn van, complete with lab table, five stools, candles, and the necessary equipment. The second subject was named Gamahut, a fact unlikely to be forgotten, owing to the man’s having had his name tattooed on his torso. Eerily, as though presaging his gory fate, he had also been tattooed with a portrait of himself from the neck up, which, without the lines of a frame to suggest an unseen body, gave him the appearance of a floating head.
Within minutes of its arrival in the van, Gamahut’s head was installed in a styptic-lined container and the men set to work, drilling holes in the skull and inserting needles into various regions of the brain to see if they could coax any activity out of the criminal’s moribund nervous system.
The ability to perform brain surgery while traveling full tilt on a cobblestone street is a testament to the steadiness of Laborde’s hand and/or the craftsmanship of nineteenth-century broughams. Had the vehicle’s manufacturers known, they might have crafted a persuasive ad campaign, à la the diamond cutter in the backseat of the smooth-riding Oldsmobile.
Laborde’s team ran current through the needles, and the Gamahut head could be seen to make the predictable twitches of lip and jaw. At one point—to the astonished shouts of all present—the prisoner slowly opened one eye, as if, with great and understandable trepidation, he sought to figure out where he was and what sort of strange locality hell had turned out to be. But, of course, given the amount of time that had elapsed, the movement could have been nothing beyond a primitive reflex.
The third time around, Laborde resorted to basic bribery to expedite his head deliveries. With the help of the local municipality chief, the third head, that of a man named Gagny, was delivered to his lab just shy of seven minutes after the chop. The arteries on the right side of the neck were injected with oxygenated cow’s blood, and, in a break from BrownSéquard’s protocol, the arteries on the other side were connected to those of a living animaclass="underline" un chien vigoureux. Laborde had an arresting flair for details, which the medical journals of his day seemed pleased to accommodate. He devoted a full paragraph to an artful description of a severed head resting upright on the lab table, rocking ever so slightly left and right from the pulsing pressure of the dog’s blood as it pumped into the head. In another paper, he took pains to detail the postmortem contents of Gamahut’s excretory organs, though the information bore no relation to the experiment at hand, noting with seeming fascination that the stomach and intestines were completely empty save for un petit bouchon fécal at the far end.
With the Gagny head, Laborde came closest to restoring normal brain function. Muscles on the eyelids, forehead, and jaw could be made to contract. At one point Gagny’s jaw snapped shut so forcefully that a loud claquement dentaire was heard. However, given that twenty minutes had passed from the drop of the blade to the infusion of blood—and irreversible brain death sets in after six to ten minutes—it is certain that Gagny’s brain was too far gone to be brought around to anything resembling consciousness and he remained blessedly ignorant of his dismaying state of affairs. The chien, on the other hand, spent its final, decidedly less vigoureux minutes watching its blood pump into someone else’s head and no doubt produced some claquements dentaires of its own.
Laborde soon lost interest in heads, but a team of French experimenters named Hayem and Barrier took up where he left off. The two became something of a cottage industry, transfusing a total of twenty-two dog heads, using blood from live horses and dogs. They built a tabletop guillotine specially fitted to the canine neck and published papers on the three phases of neurological activity following decapitation. Monsieur Guillotin would have been deeply chagrined to read the concluding statements in Hayem and Barrier’s description of the initial, or “convulsive,” postdecapitation phase. The physiognomy of the head, they wrote, expresses surprise or ” une grande anxiété,” and appears to be conscious of the exterior world for three or four seconds.
Eighteen years later, a French physician by the name of Beaurieux confirmed Hayem and Barriers observations—and Sömmering’s suspicions. Using Paris’s public scaffold as his lab, he carried out a series of simple observations and experiments on the head of a prisoner named Languille, the instant after the guillotine blade dropped.
Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds… [and] ceased. The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs, …exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to see every day in the exercise of our profession…. It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice, “Languille!” I then saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contraction… such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts. Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks. I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me.
After several seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the head took on the same appearance as it had had before I called out. It was at that point that I called out again, and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time…. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement—and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead….
You know, of course, where this is leading. It is leading toward human head transplants. If a brain—a personality—and its surrounding head can be kept functional with an outside blood supply for as long as that supply lasts, then why not go the whole hog and actually transplant it onto a living, breathing body, so that it has an ongoing blood supply?
Here the pages fly from the calendar and the globe spins on its stand, and we find ourselves in St. Louis, Missouri, May 1908.
Charles Guthrie was a pioneer in the field of organ transplantation. He and a colleague, Alexis Carrel, were the first to master the art of anastomosis: the stitching of one vessel to another without leaks. In those days, the task required great patience and dexterity, and very thin thread (at one point, Guthrie tried sewing with human hair). Having mastered the skill, Guthrie and Carrel went anastomosis-happy, transplanting pieces of dog thighs and entire forelimbs, keeping extra kidneys alive outside of bodies and stitching them into groins. Carrel went on to win the Nobel Prize for his contributions to medicine; Guthrie, the meeker and humbler of the two, was rudely overlooked.
On May 21, Guthrie succeeded in grafting one dog’s head onto the side of another’s neck, creating the world’s first man-made two-headed dog. The arteries were grafted together such that the blood of the intact dog flowed through the head of the decapitated dog and then back into the intact dog’s neck, where it proceeded to the brain and back into circulation. Guthrie’s book Blood Vessel Surgery and Its Applications includes a photograph of the historic creature. Were it not for the caption, the photo would seem to be of some rare form of marsupial dog, with a large baby’s head protruding from a pouch in its mother’s fur. The transplanted head was sewn on at the base of the neck, upside down, so that the two dogs are chin to chin, giving an impression of intimacy, despite what must have been at the very least a strained coexistence. I imagine photographs of Guthrie and Carrel around that time having much the same quality.